God's SEAL: Mother Teresa

"...the body can take damn near anything. It's the mind that needs training. Can you handle injustice? Can you cope with unfairness and teremendous setbacks? Can you come back with your jaw set, determined, swearing to God you will never quit? That's what we're looking for." - Reno Alberto, Instructor, U.S. Navy / SEALS

In an August 24, 2007 New York Daily News article Mother Teresa was said to have"...spent her last 50 years secretly struggling with doubts about her faith", based on her letters. She requested that they be destroyed but they have been preserved by the Catholic Church and are published in a new book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light .

A few quotes give a sense of the intensity of her struggle.

"If there be God - please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul,"

"There is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started 'the work,'" she wrote in 1953.

She referred to Jesus as "the Absent One" as he seemingly disappeared after speaking to her in visions and conversations in 1946. She was 36 and a convent teacher riding on a train in India. Christ spoke to her directly, saying, "Come be My light."

To hang on doggedly through feelings of abandonment, doubt and emptiness, to complete her mission when it would have been understandable to give up is proof of a remarkable Faith and toughness. The SEALS are looking for this kind of toughness. So is someone else.